Web TV / IPTV / DTV

Following on from a day in an Ad tech (see earlier post below) conference - from Read/Write Web

The big news at MSN Video is that the site has embraced a "Time on Site" traffic metric that's sure to represent the future of advertising. Neilsen announced this summer that they are replacing page views with time on site as the primary web traffic metric. It's widely acknowledged that AJAX and online video are making pageviews less and less relevant all the time. While other sites (like YouTube and MySpace) keep pumping out the pageviews and trying to figure out how to best run ads - this new MSN Video site has hit on a formula that will likely represent the video portal of the future: AJAX powered video playlists, including recommended videos, that do not require new pageloads and are monetized by time-based advertising.

How the Ads Work

Visitors to MSN Video now see a pre-roll ad before their playlist of videos and then are shown another ad at most once every 3 minutes, regardless of the number of videos they have watched. It's much better than standard pre-rolls and sure to be more effective than post-roll ads.

The fact that the pre-rolls are unskippable needs to change, and 3 minutes still seems awfully frequent for ads - but the point is that this is advertising no longer tied to pageviews.

3 minutes sounds very short judging by what we were hearing today, but in the US they do get more ads with their TV so are maybe used (inured?) to it.

This was actually the old Soapbox beta, but as the Guardian's Jack Schofield notes:

What impressed me was the performance. Turns out I can right-click, hit F11 and watch the news practically full screen in reasonable quality, without any pauses. That's nowhere near possible with YouTube or Google Video, where I usually either let the whole thing download before trying to watch it, or just download the FLV file with FlashGet.

Of course, that may be because YouTube is overloaded while MSN Video is a ghost town, but it's still pretty impressive.

Either way, it would be a great demo for Microsoft's Silverlight technology.... except it's actually done in Adobe Flash 9!

Ah well......

We were a late draftee onto the Chinwag Web TV Takeover session last night, the other speakers were:

CHAIR: Colin Donald - Futurescape

Cosmo Lush - Head Of Product Development, 4OD

Paul Pod - Co-Founder, Tapeitofftheinternet (TIOTI)

Alexander Cameron - Managing Director, Digital TX Limited

Raghav Gupta - VP, International Partnerships, Brightcove (blog)

(Links to their websites via the Chinwag link above)

One of the things I discussed was the massive experimentation going on in the space, and how it was still in its early "Darwinian Evolution" phase. I didn't really have time to develop this theme, so here - in glorious Powerpoint-O-Colour - is the Broadstuff Do it Yourself Start a Web TV Company Business Plan Selecta business guide:

Just pick one from each column, and hey presto you have a Web TV Bizniss model !





There are some caveats though:

(1) If you select "User Copied Content" you get sued the minute you make money

(2) Everybody claims a Social Network play - Next.....

(3) If you run over Broadband, the Provider may want to charge you.

(4) If you use the "Set To Box" play increase your customer lock in by 100%, and add a truck roll and set top box subsidy per user to the business case

(5) If you use the "PC TV" play, be aware that few TV manufacturers build TV's with a VGA input. A good example of industry collaboration

(6) If you play over mobile deduct 6 years of your life to deal with the total lack of end to end standards

On the point of Business Models - one of my colleagues last night felt that these were irrelevant, what counted was making money.

I cannot recommend this approach highly enough

As noted in the paidContent post on the event, there was quite a debate around point (3) above last night - in fact there is quite a debate going on around Point (3) around the whole industry.

We are talking at the Mobile Web 2.0 conference today (Mobile TV seminar) and on Wednesday (panels on Standards and on Next Things).

The Mobile Web TV session is part of a more detailed workshop session on trends in the Mobile Web 2.0 world.

Our talk was on Mobile Web 2.0, how it may pan out, and who will make (any) money. In essence our views are that:

Mobile TV today is a small market and cannot afford the current friction in its supply chain
- High cost of doing business along chain from storage standards to on-phone rendering
- Limited takeup outside of S E Asian models (clear supply chain based or regulated standards)

Operator behaviour in EU, N America not helpful for growth
- Changing, but slowly and in fits and starts (AT&T/iPhone is a game change)
- Lack of recognition of risk of other avenues (Threats from outside parties)

However, the market potential is large
- Very tempting for new players with fresh approaches - Google, Apple etc
(Apple already took mobile music away from the operators)
- Colliding business models - Telco asset+subscription vs media advertising based
- “Getting advertising right” - until a customer centric model is found, Ad movement onto Mobile Web will underperform

Also presenting (and a quick synopsis) were:

Ken Blakeslee (Webmobility Ventures) - talking about Web Centric services, and the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 based on moving power to the user.

Alan Moore (SMLXL) - focus on the way we will use communities online - a good run through of a lot of the memes in the space, but with a good undertone of heavy thinking - anyone who quotes Carlota Perez is clearly doing their homework.

Sam Sethi (Blognation) - about Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. In Sam's view Web 3.0 is an Intelligent web, but which will possibly use its extra knowledge of you and your context not to serve you better but to flog more advertising to you.

(There was quite a strong audience reaction to this thesis, I can see that the putative punters are not going to take privacy pilfering lying down)

Tony Fish (AMF Ventures and co author of Mobile Web 2.0) summed up, also talked about his concept of the 4 screens of life (Cinema, TV, PC, Mobile) and how what we call "content" is increasing - the metadata, the context etc all become part of the content. He also took us through some of the thinking in the book

Interesting day...if anyone is at the conference on Wednesday look us up.